[bruce511]

That's exactly the point. It's what they do do. If you take 2nd hand jewelry to a jeweler you get about 10 cents on the dollar.

Some gets resold as is (there's a (limited) market for vintage jewelry) but most is reworked. And of course that reworking takes significant time and skill.

[Suppafly]

I don't know if it's still a thing or not, but my grandpa was telling me you can get decent jewelry from pawn shops pretty cheap if you find out how often they sell stuff to metal buyers, because metal buyers only pay around the melt price regardless of what its made of, so if you offer anywhere close to that for rings and necklaces and such, they'll often sell them to you for that.